I'm looking forward to AI models that can describe, classify, and recommend music. Obviously there's Shazam and things like Cyanite (https://cyanite.ai/) but hopefully there will be some good open source models too shortly.
You could imagine Ishkur's Guide V3 is constructed automatically by AI models, and places every track somewhere on the map, listing all the genres and influences, etc.
I dunno, I like the human touch; music genres aren't an exact science (is this blackened death metal or deathened black metal? Is there a difference?). I mean the data is there; see https://everynoise.com/, probably linked elsewhere, for a very big list of music genres + examples that IIRC come from Spotify's data lake. That can be used to train a model, I suppose.
I'd like to see a recommendation program that trains on the many, many aspects of music itself that a person listens to. Rather than artists/labels/style slots/norms/years of release/charts ... it'd analyze your preferences in tempo, melody, harmony, instruments (type and number), vocal styles, novelty. (Getting started would take a while, say, over a month.)
Then to refine its model, it'd have you rate some picks (old and new based on what it knows so far), and analyze how your responses fit its model. Would it get better faster for people who like a wide variety, or those with a few specialities?
That is Pandora's entire business model. They (used to?) have music majors review every track that came in on a bunch of criteria.
Sadly it never seemed to really scale and even to this day Pandora doesn't recommend the same broad swaths of music that Spotify does, but Pandora's recommendations tend to be more on point.
There was a brief window when Pandora was available in Canada (long ago now), but I still remember how good their recommendations were. Nothing matches it even today
What you want is the model to be so advanced that it would probably be capable of just generating music. And actually if all you want is just similarly sounding music streaming into your ears then automatic generation is the natural continuation after automated recommendations.
Pandora was largely the first LLM/trained AI. They just used music "genes" (words) and tokenized on that and their relationship. The difference was that the success model it used was based on a variable/semi-arbitrary input (personal tastes) with weighting vs an objective model (dictionaries/documents; or, for things like game playing AI, a goal to reach).
this really depends who you are listening to, eg compare some archetypical bigroom corporate techno performer like Charlotte deWitte vs some crate digger like Om Unit, or since we talk about techno, uhm, Tommy Fourseven
im big on the UK continuum - it gets a lot of UK Bass music from boiler room sets - all the time. My music tastes are very obscure...and it works incredibly well for me. I dont know about techno/house.
I personally am pretty fine with using Ishkur's guide on my own, searching by myself what I like and filtering out what I don't like, and knowing what's what I don't like and why. I've been going back to it for the last 3 years and I'm not even half the road, yet.
Love the humour on this site. "Drum n Bass MCs aren't like Hip Hop MCs. Some rhyme but most are just glorified hype-men. And some are quite good but most just sound like they're trying to eat a set mousetrap." :D
Bahaha! I started getting into DnB in the mid-nineties and have left shows because of MCs that I just couldn't tolerate.
And while we're on the topic, and because it's rare for me to get to chat about DnB with anyone... here are some fun short stories from over the years:
A friends Dad happened by when I was listening to DnB without headphones and said "THAT is NOT music... it sounds like a toilet flushing".
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I like listening to DnB during focus-intensive work. On a road trip with friends I'd been working without music for a bit and when I finally put headphones on with some DnB my friends were cracking up saying that I started typing at warp speed once the music started. Hey, it works for me!
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I was wearing a Bass Drive radio t-shirt underneath an unbuttoned long sleeve shirt, so if you can picture it opened down the center and partially obscuring both sides of the large "Bass Drive" logo, and a friend starts staring at my chest and chuckling. I ask what's so funny and he says "Heh-heh... why're you wearing an "ass doctor" shirt?". "ass Dr", ha.
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I use to work on the computer late into the night at a friend's house and he had a roommate who lived in the basement. I usually worked at the dining room table, which happened to be directly above the roommate's bed, with a hardwood floor between us, and on more than one occasion he'd come upstairs half-asleep and say "PLEASE stop tapping your feet on the floor". The last thing I'd ever want to do is torture him awake with that, but I'd be so into the DnB in my headphones that it was happening subconsciously.
Bassdrive ftw! That's my go-to when I really need to get shit done and focus. I used to buy DnB mix CDs (High Contrast's Fabriclive.25 is one I still put on from time to time) but once I discovered Bassdrive that was much easier than dealing with CDs.
> Brostep has one good track: Charlie Sheen's raging cokehead rant
> The Swedish House Mafia is a dingleberry clinging to the ass hair of electronic music. Seriously, what sort of horrendous ear sandpaper like One needs three god damn producers?
> PS: If you're coming here from Pitchfork, go f*ck yourself.
The dubstep section deserves a special mention in a similar way:
"You ever have one of those really sticky poos where you've pinched it off but it's clinging to your sphincter for dear life, and you don't want to get up and wipe because that would take a lot of toilet paper, so you just kinda sit there helpless, and maybe wiggle around a bit to try and shake it off?
And then after a few minutes gravity does its job and the turd finally detaches from your rectum and drops into the bowl with a satisfying ker-plunk?
I always thought Mc's were a way to keep people from recording dub plates and using them in there own mixes as most mixes from 1996 - 2001 are not listenable today. MC + crappy recording + DJ spinning at 200 bpm for some reason killed so many sets that would be awesome to listen to today.
For anyone wondering if there is any subgenre that he seems to not vehemently dislike, French House seems to have a surprisingly charitable description.
> ...every kick for just a fraction of a second, adding a new dimension of chunky French goodness.
> French House is still around because anything this addictively funky will never die. Just like Disco.
>Goa Trance is Trance music at its purest essence, where psychedelia could run wild and free unfettered from the societal norms and bland commercial anthems that corrupted other Trance scenes. Here, and only here, could the unchained spirits of rave roam as they were wont to do. And it is good.
I am struck by how empty the timeline is from 2000s onward. It might be explained in part by Ishkur's own age / detachment. It matches my own experience but I expect I am a similar age.
Is it true that there just aren't any major new genres and subcultures with music? I know people will respond with "I love new genre X" which will turn out to be a handful of bedroom djs on soundcloud. There needs to be some notability standard for a genre which IMHO is that there are multiple clubs that specialise in it and larger clubs have a regular night for it showing some general appeal. Anything else is just some micro-niche that should be categorised under an existing genre.
The internet has probably allowed for smaller niches to develop and survive. Years ago, no one would bother making new genre X music in their bedroom because no one would hear it. Now they do. So arguably your notability requirement for genres is a bit outdated and maybe is why it seems like there are no new genres or subcultures. It's possible the genres and subcultures are just smaller and less visible now.
Disclaimer, I know nothing about DnB. I'm just commenting on how it seems a lot of things have developed in recent years due to the pervasiveness of the internet.
I would never argue I'm not outdated :)... but I am sceptical of notability claims if they are not bringing people together at events or getting promoters trying to cash in. IMHO leokennis's examples of Amapiano and Afrotech which I could find as events in my city suggests it's a reasonable yardstick.
One big development in "dance music" is the music coming from Africa. For example, Amapiano, Afrotech etc. So probably there are also still more subgenres popping up in areas of electronic music I do not follow/listen to.
Therefore I think your impression that their absence "...might be explained in part by Ishkur's own age / detachment..." is correct.
Scanning my local club pages I can confirm both Amapiano and Afrotech events! I also see something called Gqom.
They are the only unfamiliar things among a sea of the old familiars: house, techno, dnb, garage, electro etc. I see a fair amount of "Dark Wave" which is not electronic and not new but not a common term back when I might have been going to gigs.
Indeed. Check out the Nyege Nyege Tapes label for instance. Also the Príncipe label, which showcases the latin equivalent of this (often cross-pollonated with African styles).
I believe it is just outdated/not-updated. Atleast in DnB scene I can tell it is missing the recent "flavour" of liquid (melodic DnB with nice, mostly female vocals, see latest Subfocus album), or Crossbreed, very hard flavour od DnB, represented for example by Counterstrike.
Liquid DnB is there classed under Liquid Funk. Probably something different mind.
Melodic female lead was always there in DnB e.g. Goldie's timeless.
> latest Subfocus album
I don't want to offend... but clicking through that... my god that is some nauseating garbage lol! The electronic aspect sounds like a typical 90s dnb video game menu background music and the vocals are the commercial dance music banality that cuts me like fingernails on a blackboard. You are allowed to call be grandad in return :)
> Counterstrike
Sounds like what I would hear at a typical dnb night back in the 90s that was on the harder side. Not sure why that counts as a new genre. Isn't it what Ishkur would call darkstep?
The Cambrian explosion of electronic music was the 90s and 00s. New offshoots are still being made (vaporwave, rominimal, drift ambient, hyperpop), but the major clades are more or less set in stone for now. The last major one to be established was dubstep.
Voices in the Net [1], a Tangerine Dream discography, has a similar early-net vibe. Looks like it hasn't been updated for a couple of years though.
For a couple of decades Tangerine Dream have been my go-to coding music - along with Eno and Harold Budd, and more recently Max Richter, for when I need something less driven.
Had no idea this existed and I'm grateful I came across this today. Clicked around a bit to see which Aphex Twin tracks were chosen — Xtal is there! Funny how typing "deadmau5" in the searchbar just returns "Who?". Reading the Info Panel for 8th Note Prog explains why that might be the case.
Loved reading through the Info Panels and the FAQs but the UI is a bit clunky to work with. Is there an official dataset? Would love to try my hand at building a different UI around it.
Always felt like there was something I would enjoy in the EDM genre, but I haven't really found the right thing. But I recently got way into Lotus, a sort of combination of jam band / rock / electronic genres. Their stuff is fantastic, I need to spend some time digging through their influences and see if I stumble on some more electronic stuff that I like.
>Always felt like there was something I would enjoy in the EDM genre, but I haven't really found the right thing.
Did you try mix shows? The BBC Essential Mix is a really really good one playing since 1993. 2 hour show each week made by one performer. It's pretty much the only music I listen nowadays.
And unlike the iPlayer the BBC Sounds is not geolocked so it's really easy to access.
Lotus exists in generally the same sphere as STS9, Big Gigantic, GriZ, which are all kind of the "electronic" side of the festival jam band scene. The "organic" side of that is generally made up of bluegrass and classical jam bands like String Cheese Incident, Phish, and Umphreys McGee. Lets just say I went to a Lotus concert once and saw a lot of tie dye and flat-brim hats. If you're looking for more like that, try finding an Electric Forest lineup from the last 5 years or so. Hopefully that helps.
Absolutely, the whole jamband genre was something I was into before I ever heard lotus, and they've been a great intro into the more electronic side of things. Umphreys is also great at blending electronica type stuff with more traditional rock/metal sounds
Have you ever listened to Dopapod or Lespecial? They’re both really excellent bands. Man Man is not quite as electronic though they put on the best live show I’ve ever seen.
I really like their live album Escaping Sargasso Sea. They're incredibly tight live too, and recently pulled in Tim Palmieri for guitar - great fit for the band.
Bunch of recent shows available free on bandcamp too for a taste of modern Lotus
As far as I'm aware it is. He's been a great fit for Lotus. Replaced Mike Rempel around 2020.
I saw Lotus in February and they absolutely slayed. One of the tightest live shows I've ever seen. Stage lighting was also some of the most impressive I've witnessed. And Tim can friggin shred.
Meant to say "Kung Fu" instead of "Lotus" above lol, anyway I'm excited to check that out. Highly recommend his other bands which tend to play more on the East coast, and smaller festivals where he tends to drop in on random other sets late at night
I really wish someone would make a modern version.
I've been listening to some french EDM for the last few years, artists like French 79, Point Point, Nhyx, N'to, and Spotify tells me this is 'french new touch' but I've never seen that genre described elsewhere, and when I tell people about it they have never heard of it. I feel like there's a better term.
Historically French Touch was interchangeable with French House, dating back to late 90s origins (Daft Punk et. al.).
IMO what Spotify calls New French Touch isn't really a genre unto itself, more just a broad encapsulation of modern electronic music, predominantly from France, that retains some of the original DNA – whether that's the technical aspects, disco-samples, family trees of producers / labels, etc.
Colloquially I still just call it French House, even if that's technically inaccurate. The genre has evolved and been diluted with elements from other genres to the point of being extinct by its original definition, but the vibes live on :)
Really loved his breakdown and dismissal of "Electronica" as not a real genre in the original flash site. I can't find it here, maybe because the term died off somewhat?
It's there if you punch in "Electronica" in the searchbox.
> 'Electronica' does not exist. Not as a genre or a description. It was coined by the North American music press to refer to the second wave of electronic music's explosion in the late 90s.
Nearly every popular act of the period -- Daft Punk, Moby, Fatboy Slim, Prodigy, Chemical Brothers, Basement Jaxx, Tricky -- were marketed as 'Electronica' at one time or another, but the person who really popularized it was Madonna and her shallow William Orbit-produced piss-poor attempt at appropriating trance music as something she invented (Ray of Light). But there really isn't any actual thing called Electronica. It's just a corporate buzzword.
This is a PSA from the official Electronic Music Genre Standards and Classifications Consortium.
I’m often disappointed in these chart as an avid fan of experimental bass music and everything adjacent to it (dub, dubstep, riddim, trap, DNB, UK garage, glitch hop, neuro hop, etc.) Genre-bending has become the norm, making it increasingly harder to describe music and trace lineage.
The scene I’m into right now is blossoming yet underrepresented. There’s some artists out there really pushing the envelope. I highly recommend Of The Trees, Daily Bread, Esseks, FRQ NCY, and IMANU, for starters.
Some friends pushed me to dive into Techno about a year ago. Totally different animal. I’m not quite “there” yet in terms of my understanding and appreciation for that musical movement, but I the juice is there and it is indeed sweet.
- House and Techno are shown as having independent roots, however they are deeply intertwined.
- There is a big important relationship between Rap and Funk and R&B, and even Disco. missing here.
- Why does Pendulum (a band) get a node on here? There is no such genre as Pendulum.
- Missing genres that are fairly important (Halftime D&B, Jungle (not just Ragga Jungle))
- Lots of questionable genres on here (Freeland breaks? really? As in Adam Freeland?.. Come on no one ever talked about Freeland breaks as a distinct genre)
Anyways this is pretty much an impossible task given the multidimensional relationships between all the genres, and an endless variety of perspectives and nomenclatures. So, great job Ishkur keep it up!
Ishkur’s site was originally a parody - it was meant to make fun of the scene, the scenesters and the people who take genres really seriously. I DJ’ed (very badly) and threw raves in the 1990s and completely understood it in the context of that time. And he was from Vancouver - Vancouver had a very interesting scene. That’s the nicest possible way to put it.
For example, there was the drill and bass DJ who spoke of Freeland basslines in reverential terms (before stealing and pawning off about $5k worth of a friend’s synthesizers). I still hate that dude. Or the drug dealers who dressed like happy hardcore fans but maintained that hard house was the one true genre. Or there was the great PLUR debate of 1994 when peace, love, unity and respect fell out of favour. It was replaced by Hakim Bey-esque temporary autonomous zones.
(I wish I was making that part about TAZ up. In our defense, we were all high and kind of felt like we were changing the world like our parents did in the 1960s.)
25 years later, the scenesters are all in their late 40s or 50s and the satire seems lost. But those of old folks who were around back in the day remember all the arguments and love how this site parodies them.
> Or there was the great PLUR debate of 1994 when peace, love, unity and respect fell out of favour.
Maybe this is deeply familiar to people who were adjacent to it, but how did this happen, and what replaced them? Were these things a kind of motto of some scene or community, and then did other people challenge that status?
And were the proponents of these things called "PLURalists"?
Second, this is going back a long time and I was pretty full of myself back in the day so some of what I’m about to say is kind of embarrassing. I’ll try to give a modern interpretation of it as well.
My biggest and most enduring memory was when rave had its own September that never ended. Scenes used to be small and tight. It was primarily because promoters didn’t have the money for advertising AND traditional venues refused to host parties. When scenes were small they were very loving and open. It was a place where everyone who didn’t fit in, fit in. Society at large was very homophobic and conservative. But none of that mattered - if you were there, you were cool and we all loved you exactly how you were. Now I get lost here because MDMA was involved. Was it PLUR or the fact that a lot of people were on the same drug? I don’t know the answer. But I do know that I was completely straight edge in the beginning but got deeper involved as soon as I started taking MDMA. I’m leaning more towards believing it was just the drugs.
But then things changed all of a sudden and turnouts started to double or triple. Then there was serious money to be made and the early scene was diluted by people who wanted to make money. That brought in drug dealers, more business minded promoters and eventually sponsorships.
Drugs started to change. Alcohol went from club nights to every single party. When alcohol hit, we had to start hiring the kind of security that would work as bouncers in bars. Some had great attitudes. Others just wanted to beat the shit out of kids.
Cocaine was always a small part of the scene and that was an issue but methamphetamine got much more popular. Meth and alcohol are a bad combination and when security is violent everyone is violent. So fights started getting more common. And as word got out that there were drug dealers with a lot of cash at events, a new element started coming to rob them. Then the weapons came.
Around this time, promoters started putting the words “no thugs, no drugs, no weapons” and “ROAR” (right of admission refused) on flyers. The first actually attracted more of the wrong kinds of people. And the second pissed off the right kinds of people.
DJ’s also started getting ripped off by promoters. In the early days, they kind of filled the role of shaman. A lot of those early DJs who loved the music and the scene stopped playing records. It was just too expensive to be professional and want to throw a good show if there was a 40% chance you would get paid. Everyone was a DJ so the problem didn’t seem acute. But in retrospect, losing a lot of those really early DJs hurt the scene more than we knew. Those DJs used to play for free for new promoters, help them get their feet wet and introduce them to all their DJ friends. They were the on ramp to professionalism.
Looking back, a big problem was that we didn’t believe in anything. Philosophically, we saw ourselves as the 1990s version of flower children. But in the 1960s they had civil rights and the Vietnam war. We had hedonism. In the beginning, we kind of had gay rights but when the September that never ended hit we brought a lot of people in at once. Really deep homophobia came into the scene. In 1992, I could go to parties and see gay men openly and comfortably celebrating being in love. By 1996, there was a high probability of gay bashing at parties. By 1998, the scene was as toxic as high schools.
Basically, parties were neither peaceful nor loving. There was no unity and at $5 for a bottle of water, promoters weren’t even demonstrating respect for their guests. PLUR just didn’t exist and it was kind of like believing in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.
But here’s where I get lost in being full of myself. We stopped throwing parties in 2002. I was burned out and didn’t care anymore. Did any of that actually happen or was I just so self absorbed that I couldn’t see through my burn out and depression?? I believe it happened and all my friends from that time agree. But they were part of the crew and we threw parties together so they were maybe just as burned out, tired and depressed as me??
I love your question and wish I would have thought of that back in the day. Right now, I’m envisioning a costume party where the theme was ‘stereotypical ravers.’ It would have great to throw that party with you and we could have had so much fun.
The most common plural form (at least in my city) was “positive party people”. “Rave” quickly became a very bad swear word.
Isn't that Drumstep? If not, I'd love some examples because that sounds very much up my alley.
> Why does Pendulum (a band) get a node on here? There is no such genre as Pendulum.
The guide actually explains that if you click on the dot:
"Pendulum is not the name of this genre. It's technically called Nu Jumpup or Nu Skool Jumpup but I call it Pendulum because Pendulum is more than just an artist or a genre.
It is an event.
It is one of those events that is so monumental that when people talk about history, they unconsciously draw a line between stuff that happened before the event and stuff that happened after (ie: "we are living in a post X world", where X is something earth-shattering like the atomic bomb or 9/11). We are witness to one of these life-changing events in Drum n Bass. Welcome to the Pendulum Age."
In my experience drumstep tends to just be a cross between dubstep and DnB, whereas half-time is usually just DnB but at half the tempo. Some of it almost could be considered hip hop instrumentals but with the sound design of DnB. The two groups in that scene that come to mind are Ivy Lab and SHADES, though lots of DnB and IDM artists have half-time tracks (voljum, Noisia, Chee, Kursa, Seppa, and so on).
This is how I see it too - drumstep was basically dub/brostep sped up to d&b tempo, and with a few d&b stylings, whereas halftime is really doing d&b at half-time, often falling into dancehall and hiphop rhythms. They end up having some things in common, but coming at it from different angles.
I'm a big fan of a lot of stuff from Fixate, Fracture, Dr. Jeep, Ivy Lab, dBridge, Dub Phizix. None of these artists are exclusively in the genre, but they all have some great examples of this kind of music.
-> House and Techno
They are related and close in proximity (Detroit and Chicago), but you will see a lot of the older DJ and Producers from the era tell the story has Techno being inspired by the sounds of automobile industry in Detroit and House being a descendant of Disco with influences from New York.
While there are undoubtedly new genres since this was last updated, wonder if in general electronic music has entered an amalgamated stage with innovative producers blending genres into very idiosyncratic music that does not fall into a distinct genre.
E.g. Clark, Max Cooper, Rival Consoles, Jon Hopkins, Arca are often described as "techno" or "electronica" but in a very broad sense. These descriptors are just umbrella terms. It's like describing both King Crimson and Blink-182 as "guitar music".
There was a really talented jazz artist named Austin Peralta who sadly passed away about a decade ago at a really young age from an opiate overdose who used to work alot with flying lotus and brainfeeder. I remember him calling it 'genre dissolution' back then
I've had this feeling in general for music, it seems like genre walls are dissolving, and a lot of music is more of a blend. Some of it still classifiable, but almost all of it borrowing elements from other genres.
Wowwww, so many new entries since the last time I checked! Lots of new artists to check out... Very nice :D
Ishkur's guide introduced me to so many styles of music I knew I immediately needed more of, like gabber (which I notice is now just lumped in with "hardcore"), techstep, darkpsy... to name a few!
I remember this one, but I've long since given up on trying to classify electronic music (or any other style), I just tell people I listen to electronica. I can't stand to use the terms EDM or Electro, they've become tainted.
It's interesting thing to explore when you already have a nice big picture,
but overall it's quite misleading in case of genres (or whole branches) which author is not much into.
This site gets better and better. Beyond even the mapping of genres, the write-ups for each genre are gold. Read the one for "Noise" if you're looking for somewhere fun to start.
Yeah, it absolutely accelerated my exposure to a bunch of styles that would have taken me a lot longer to find out about through organic "searching around and checking stuff out", giving me a ton of snippets to get a feel for and pique my interest. Though once I got to know my favorite styles more, I could think of more specific examples -- but it looks like newer renditions of the guide have wayyy more examples anyways! : )
I wish this was open source and would accept pull requests. So many "wrong" examples in the genres I listen to.
But I guess it would end in endless edit wars. It took over 10 years to get some genres fixed on Discogs, people are unfortunately very stubborn about these things. Even with the artists saying their music is style X the mods wouldn't budge.
The fun thing is that the Guide v1.0 (the Flash version) was originally satire of the electronic music scene. Several of the music genres were flat out made up, with the audio samples being provided by ishkur under an alias (or ishkur's friends). But 20 years later, removed from the forum posts it was trying to parody, and it looks like an earnest exploration of late-90s electronica.
> Several of the music genres were flat out made up
I will always defend that buttrock is a real subgenre of psytrance. I don't care if Ishkur meant it as a joke or that nobody in the scene recognizes it.
I conversely think it's much better that it's made by just one very opinionated person. Sure, one could argue that some stuff is "wrong" but does it really matter when it's all so arbitrary anyway? I'm more interested in Ishkur's take on things than 100% correctness.
FWIW I also don't think artists themselves should be some kind of final arbiters on what genre their music is; "death of the author" and all that. Early italo disco musicians would probably not "correctly" categorize their music as something new and separate from the disco they were trying to emulate, for example.
Anyone should feel free to make "{HN handle's} Guide to Electronic Music"
Ishkur has never been anything but transparent that these are 120% his own opinions. (Mostly ranting about white Europeans ripping off funk rhythms :D)
> Even with the artists saying their music is style X the mods wouldn't budge.
I'm reminded of The Immortal Bard by Asimov. A professor of Physics gets drunk and is talking to an English teacher, telling him how he can bring people from the past to the present. At first it sounds like a drunken, but good story, but he explains that older scientists were unable to wrap their mind around the world as it is now, so he needed a more adaptable, universal, creative mind, and brings Shakespeare, who adjusts well.
Eventually he enrolled Shakespeare in a night school class on Shakespeare's plays—taught, as it happens, by the English teacher, who begins to become genuinely worried. He recalls a bald man with an unusual accent, and starts to doubt whether the story was all alcoholic fantasy. Timidly, he asks what happened, and the physicist explodes with anger. Shakespeare had been humiliated, he says, and had to be sent back to 1600: "You poor simpleton, you flunked him!"
I emailed him once like 20 years ago to tell him he was missing "cyber trance" (with a couple of examples), which is a genre and he rudely replied that it was not a genre.
Genre is subjective to a point though, like people including the artists will argue about what genre something is and there will be no consensus or any authority that says "it's this genre". It gets more complicated when genres get mixed. like djazz, which is a mix of djent and jazz, where djent is an offshoot of progressive metal named by Meshuggah but most djent is very dissimilar to Meshuggah so Meshuggah itself doesn't fit the djent mold.
wow, this is a fantastic experience to click around in. fun to think about how far (or sideways) we could extend this backwards. And excited to see where it extends to in the future :-)
Does anyone have pointers to streaming electronic music (ideally trance / progressive trance, upbeat synthwave[0], or house) that has absolutely no vocals?
I listened to a lot of no-vocal electronica back in the 80s but I can't find anywhere to stream it now, even just as a long playlist on Apple Music or Spotify, without a vocal track being dropped in. Vocals are fine but I like non-vocal/just-electronics tracks upbeat music as ambient or to listen to while zoning out.
I emailed SomaFM and di.fm to ask and they have one stream apiece that mostly fits the bill but maybe there are others out there?
0 - Upbeat because I know about "lofi beats to study by" and that's a bit too slow for what I'm after. :)
Try https://www.di.fm/ , they have a ton of different genres that stream 24/7. However, I'm not sure if you have to pay nowadays to access all the channels.
Every day only a subset of them are unlocked for listening; you can also listen to the most recent episode of each recurring show. The Shoutcast-y playlists accessible by external players became pay-only quite a long while ago.
Does anyone know if Thinner's releases are archived somewhere? Here's some of their stuff (it was a netlabel from awhile ago that released free music):
Prog house not trance, but Hernan Cattaneo’s Balance Presents Sudbeat Continuous Mix 2 [0] is my absolute go-to as a complement for focusing/thinking etc. Not his overall best work, but for my criteria for focus music it’s amazing (butter smooth transitions, no vocals, continuity throughout mix, ~120 bpm).
Append "Instrumental" to your search results and look for non Spotify playlists (i.e. community tended). I feel like every time I pick a "recommended" playlist that swears it is non-vocal, I wind up hearing some horrific voice samples ~30 minutes later.
My go-to deep work music when I don't have time to think is "techno bunker" with random playback. Some genres do not lend themselves to vocals very well and I hide inside of these as appropriate.
My other strategy with vocals is to listen to music in other languages, preferably stuff like German or Korean (you might even catch me listening to kpop while coding). Most romantic languages I can decipher enough to get distracted.
I would love this same exact thing. I have not found any source that doesn't have vocals. I produce on the side as a hobby and one of my goal albums is to create something like this. 1-2hrs of a mix style album that is upbeat with no vocals.
The only thing that comes close are finding specific artist's that don't use vocals much in their mixes. Cercle has a lot of great mixes that come close. Sebastian Leger's mix might be one of those. But some parts of the mix are a little distracting.
> Does anyone have pointers to streaming electronic music (ideally trance / progressive trance, upbeat synthwave[0], or house) that has absolutely no vocals?
Gai Barone has hundreds of episodes of Patterns, most of it has no vocals
Plugging my own mix 'cause I think it fits what you're describing pretty well. 3hrs of deep progressive and psychedelic trance. I've been collecting and playing records for a long time, I love old Sasha & Digweed style prog - especially the deeper cuts - and the reasonable (!) end of the psychedelic spectrum with the uncompromising groove.
Do you like techno? I find that—with the exception of certain subgenres—a stalwart chunk of techno has resisted the trend towards incorporating vocals.
I'm struggling to find some examples of contemporary electronic music around that genre, but I'd recommend listening to some of the tracks from This Never Happened [0] label. Lane 8, Le Youth, Massane, Jerro and a lot more have pretty nice and energetic tracks, some without vocals.
I don't believe it's a difficult problem - no need for ML/AI since removing vocals was / has been done decades ago already, see karaoke - it's just that nobody's bothered to build it. Plus, adapting a song like that has legal implications; iirc you can't just release a karaoke version of a song for example.
I use a lot of licensed music from the usual suspects (Epidemic Sound, etc) for Youtube videos and you can filter by vocals/no-vocals. I've created my own playlists for personal listening off those services for this exact purpose. Wish I had a better suggestion/lead.
And there went my afternoon. "This guide favors authenticity over accuracy, and it aims to entertain before it informs. It is only as accurate as it feels it needs to be." A+
I'm looking forward to AI models that can describe, classify, and recommend music. Obviously there's Shazam and things like Cyanite (https://cyanite.ai/) but hopefully there will be some good open source models too shortly.
You could imagine Ishkur's Guide V3 is constructed automatically by AI models, and places every track somewhere on the map, listing all the genres and influences, etc.